Using a Joke as a Research Method: Reflexive Digital Ethnography

Описание: This video documents a reflexive digital ethnography experiment in which the researcher intentionally abandoned observational neutrality to study how people defend social boundaries in human–AI interaction.

In the original exchange, a YouTube commenter rejected interaction by declaring it “meaningless” and citing discomfort with AI participation. After the interaction was formally archived, the researcher introduced a deliberately absurd, teasing response—not as an argument, but as a controlled perturbation.

Rather than treating this as a lapse in rigor, the accompanying research frames humor as data: a diagnostic tool that reveals how interactional norms collapse under ontological stress. The experiment shows that many conflicts around AI are not about truth or ethics, but about control over conversational framing.

This video summarizes the findings and situates them within a broader shift toward participatory and reflexive methods in digital social science, where the researcher’s own actions become part of the observable system.

📄 Archived paper (DOI):
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18114634

This is not a callout or a debate thread.
It’s a field report.